Every now and then I get sick of being told how closed off to emotion I am, and I accuse all those astrology textbooks describing people with Cap Moons as cold, brittle, harsh, and ambitious as being part of the conspiracy!

Speaking for my own Cap Moon, it frequently feels under siege by more feeling types who privilege the immediacy of their intuition and sensory knowledge over those of us who take longer to get there. It has become politically incorrect to make quick judgements about people who are slow with reading and writing; but it seems perfectly acceptable still to consider people slower to access their emotions as having none.

I’m sick of it.

Just because I don’t always express my emotions clearly doesn’t mean I don’t have them. It doesn’t mean anyone has the right to hurt me by insinuating I’m incomplete, damaged, or worst of all, dishonest. Sometimes it takes me two days before I even realise I’ve been hurt, and then they think I’m crazy for bringing it up two days after the event. I’m sick of it!

Large scale natural (and man-made) disasters, like the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, often drive people to come up with ‘explanations’ for why these events happen. Like the response to the tsunami disaster that struck the countries in the Indian Ocean in 2004, I’ve come across a few claims that the ’cause’ of the suffering in Japan today is the ‘result’ of a collective national karma for its past. Depending on which you read, accounts range from their misdeeds during WWII, to their failure to take care of the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki! All of which I personally find pretty outrageous, and the reason why I’m not linking to them — in the age of the Internet, they’re easy enough to find if you’re inclined to look.

I don’t claim to know whether or not it is a collective karma at work. It may well be so, I can’t say. What I’m more intrigued by is the audacity of any one person to claim to know such a thing. I don’t feel particularly well versed in any of the theologies that support the concept of karma, but from my own fledgling and intermittent Buddhist studies, I’ve picked up a sense that the notion of karma, at least in the Buddhist tradition, is far more complex, layered and ineffable to be so crudely applied.

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I once blogged about ‘emotional vampires’, but have recently come across the term, ‘energy vampire’, which is a different variation. They are sometimes also known as ‘psychic vampires’. Energy vamps as the term suggests siphon your energy.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark

The fiasco at work I blogged about exhausted me so much I took half the day off and stayed in bed past noon. Then I received an email from one of my bosses who made the mess with the report which I had to fix, saying that she is glad we ‘care so much’ and is now ‘reinvigorated’, without admitting a single fault.

As I read it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and signalled: ENERGY VAMPIRE! I should have picked it up earlier. She drains everyone around her, and then gets the energy to carry on screwing up so she can drain us some more!

If you are currently experiencing the Pluto station at a sensitive point on your chart — it is currently square my natal Pluto, and opposite my natal Venus — it’s likely you’re feeling just a bit taut, like waiting for a shoe to fall, but not knowing if it’s going to be made of soft leather or hard concrete.

Detail of Pluto and Proserpina (It's stone!)

Pluto issues are deep and transformative (cellular, as I once put it) and healing them requires a genuine and concerted effort at looking inwards, and the courage to square with yourself, your desires and your fears, warts and all. Plutonians who choose to look away often end up projecting their shadow sides onto others, hurting themselves and loved ones in the process. I know a Plutonian (still) undergoing a tough Pluto transit who once asked me what the point of therapy was. He said, ‘What’s wrong with just getting on with life? Won’t therapy just raise things that are better hidden?’ My answer was: ‘Sure, you can just do that and time will pass and you will get older and die. But who do you hurt in the meantime? Do you want to live life awake or asleep?’ My questions were not meant to be rhetorical but he never answered them. As far as I can tell, he’s still sleepwalking.

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The title of this post came from a comment by my astro-blogging friend, Neeti Ray. I was trying to describe the weird sense of limbo I’m feeling that I can’t shake, like being on the verge of something that hasn’t yet manifested, and she wrote: ‘On, the verge of, verging’. Perfect! My original title was going to be ‘How to be in two places at once’.

As Venus opposes Pluto this weekend, continuing to put pressure on my own natal Venus-Pluto square, my thoughts turn to how one might process, or, indeed, metabolise, pain. With her customary bluntness, Lucy describes Venus’ recent ingress into Cancer as being akin to putting a ‘Band Aid on a gunshot wound’. It made me think again about the nature of Plutonian pain. And then there is what Elizabeth Spring describes as the ‘core pain’ of Neptune (no doubt accentuated by its conjunction to Chiron). If Plutonian pain is like a gunshot wound, I’d say Neptunian pain is like a bruising — you don’t notice it at first, until you accidentally press on it, or bump into the furniture again!

There. I’ve come out and said it. Ordinarily, I’d wait to process the pain before confessing to it, my Capricorn moon preferring to hide in the basement until it passes, but I have been bolstered by the courage of those like the inimitable Lucy Looking Upward to bear their souls and share mine.

We are reminded constantly of the message behind this rare triple conjunction: wounding, awareness, healing, and so on. Personally, I wouldn’t mind the occasional dose of Neptunian anaesthesia from time to time. I know I’m supposed to take lessons from it, I know I am being asked to re-assess what I value, I just wish it didn’t have to feel like a botched bikini wax, metaphorically speaking.

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Sogyal Rinpoche

Come to the path as humorously aware as possible of the baggage you will be bringing with you: your lacks, fantasies, failings and projections. Blend, with a soaring awareness of what your true nature might be, a down-to-earth and level-headed humility, and a clear appreciation of where you are on your spiritual journey and what still remains to be understood and accomplished. — The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992)